The Cuban Comedy Read online

  Among the guests was an octogenarian member of the Poets’ Society who had written a two-hundred-page epic poem titled Idyll of Piedra Negra, parts of which he insisted on reading by candlelight, accompanied by the feral screeches of the band while the guests waited for the young parents to appear from the back of the house. After a half hour Fermín José could not stand any more bad poetry. He wrestled the manuscript from the poet’s hands and threw it out on the street, where it was run over by a milk truck. As he came back inside the house, he declared, “Modesty is not a sentiment that abounds in the souls of poets.” The poet was incensed and he responded by challenging Fermín José to a duel.

  “According to the code duello,” Fermín José said, “I am the one challenged so I have the choice of weapons.”

  Dr. Guzmán tried to pacify the situation by making light of the matter, but he was drowned out by Pedro el Cruel, who jumped up and said, “Carajo, that is true. I have it for a fact.” He was excited to be able to witness the first duel in Piedra Negra since his father, Pedro Macandal Garcés, sliced a man’s stomach open with a saber.

  “Avocados,” said Fermín José.

  “Avocados?” one of the veterans asked as a murmur arose from the group.

  “Yes,” said Fermín José. “There’s a very fertile tree in the backyard and the ground is covered with fruit.”

  “When?” the poet asked. He had grown pale and his lips were quivering.

  “According to the rules, that is up to the challenger,” Pedro el Cruel said, though he knew nothing of the code duello.

  “Let’s do it right now,” one of the veterans said. “If we wait too much longer the avocados will rot and they won’t be good for throwing.”

  “Gentlemen,” said the poet, whose thinness was accentuated by the formality of his demeanor. His black suit was frayed around the lapels and there were moth holes on the sleeves. “I’ve never heard of a duel in which the weapons are avocados. The suggestion goes well beyond precedent. If I remember correctly, the traditional weapons are swords or firearms, pistols at that, rather than rifles. Hurling fruit at each other is beneath masculine dignity.”

  Pedro el Cruel said avocados were not fruit but vegetables.

  “Allow me to correct you,” said the poet, “if correct I may. The avocado, or, better said, the Persea americana, is a plant of the family Lauraceae. Its fruit is a pulpy berry with a seed at the center.”

  Pedro el Cruel looked at the poet as if he were an insect. “Do me a favor,” he said, waving his fist at him, “and stick an avocado up your ass.”

  At that moment Elena entered the living room with Soledad in her arms and Pedrito limping alongside, wearing the new shiny leg he’d bought for the occasion, made of mahogany and sure to last well into the afterlife. As she advanced, Elena emitted a glow that could only be called angelic and she smiled broadly at the group.

  The poet offered a toast. The duel and the avocados were forgotten, and Soledad became the totem of peace and concord. The only one who didn’t smile or join the celebration was Pedrito, who sweated like a pack mule. From him emanated a dense, acrid smell and in his eyes glistened the desperation of the alcoholic. He wanted to drink with the others, but more than anything he wanted to drink alone, drown his sorrow and his will in order to resuscitate them repeatedly in the vicious rhythm of drunkenness that ends in a blackout. At that moment Pedrito had everything—house, food, daughter, wife, a successful business with every opportunity for growth—but what he longed for above all else was the total annihilation of all need, save the need for alcohol.

  His sobriety lasted until he said goodbye to the last guest. When his wife, daughter, and in-laws were safely asleep, he gathered several bottles of firewater and went to the park. There he found his veteran friends, the only ones who understood him, and drank as he never had before. Pedrito was never good for anything after that. Six months passed and he was found wandering the marshes, speaking in tongues and smeared with mud and vegetable matter. From him came the smell of death. Elena once again came and got him and took him home, where he died in bed, cursing the mother of God, the angels, and their offspring.

  Elena didn’t feel the need to mourn for a man who loved alcohol more than he had loved her, and so she went back to her writing as soon as Pedrito was put in the ground in the proper manner. Words fluttered in her chest like bats, they perched in her ovaries and entered her heart, making it beat with wild intensity. The day was a cave, the night a black sea, the trees the hands of earth, worms the fingers of the soul, hens the wet nurses of summer. A fork danced a waltz and a knife had a fight to the death with a bone. When she ran out of pages, she left Soledad in the care of her mother and rushed to Antúnez’s general store with two bottles of firewater. With so much political upheaval in the capital, the peso had become worthless. As a result, firewater became the most valuable currency in the town. Antúnez, an old Asturian who had settled in Piedra Negra many years before, was waiting for her with five school notebooks wrapped in wax paper and tied with string.

  “Excellent, my child, excellent!” the Asturian said, eyeing the bottles. “From this milk the empire is nourished.”

  Elena didn’t know what empire Antúnez was referring to. She liked to listen to him speak about the glories of the capital, the way the light reflected off the facade of the buildings and created a glow the traveler saw from a ship riding the waves of the Gulf Stream or an airplane about to land.

  “When I first arrived,” he told Elena in a dreamy tone, “it was as if God himself had come down from the heavens to sit and speak with his friends in the Park of the Whispers. In the capital, music flows from the houses like the breeze of Eden. The women are enticing and the men forbidding. Poets inhabit the bell towers and recite their verses via megaphones five times a day like muezzins in other parts of the world. On every street corner there is a writer—a novelist or a playwright—and where the writer is missing, a musician will take his place, or else a street philosopher, who will discourse on the mysteries of life.”

  When he finished Antúnez’s face grew shadowy. He gave Elena a copy of Daniel Arcilla’s latest collection of poetry, titled Poems under Heaven, and retired to the back room with the two bottles. Elena put the bundle of notebooks along with Arcilla’s book in her backpack and flew home, driven by an unexplainable urge to read it, which she did through the night, with an intensity that bordered on the obsessive. By morning she was certain that Daniel Arcilla was the greatest poet in the world. She convinced herself that his soul had entered her body and commingled with hers, forming a spiritual and poetic union that could never be rent asunder. In her imagination she made the mistake (common enough among impressionable readers) of conflating the man’s poetry with his person and convinced herself that Arcilla was a great and good man, worthy of her attention and loyalty. She would have given anything to sit with him and listen to him expound on his ideas about the art of poetry, and then, when he was done, feed him, care for him, and make profound and unrestrained love on a large, pillowy bed.

  Elena’s fantasy was interrupted by Soledad’s crying in the bedroom. When Elena stood over the crib, the strong smell made her lean back and wince. Soledad was on her back fidgeting and clawing the air, her face red with displeasure. Elena took off her soiled diaper, washed her, and sprinkled talcum powder on the girl’s bum. When she tried to put Soledad back, she screamed even louder and Elena was compelled to pick her up, a little too roughly, and carry her out to the distilling room to continue work on the day’s firewater batch. Later, Elena felt a prick of guilt over the way she’d handled her daughter and wanted to hold her again, but by then Cándida had taken her up and was rocking her to sleep in her arms.

  It was the winter after Pedrito died that Elena learned via postal mail that she had won the National Poetry Prize by a single unanimous vote of the jury, headed by Daniel Arcilla, the Bard of the Revolution. The letter invited her to the capital the following month to accept the prize and supervise
the publication of her manuscript. She gave a yelp, then hyperventilated and had to sit down so she wouldn’t fall to the floor. That night she suffered an attack of diarrhea that lasted over three weeks. She grew so pale and lost so much weight that her father, distracted momentarily from the chess table by a large fly that was buzzing around his head, saw her pass by and became alarmed that a stranger had entered the house.

  “It’s me, your daughter,” Elena said.

  Fermín José looked again. “My God,” he said. “You look like you have a foot in the next world.”

  “I’m going to the capital to get my prize.”

  “Who will take care of Soledad?”

  In all the excitement Elena had not thought about her daughter. The responsibilities of motherhood did not weigh heavily on her and she had a quick answer: “Mama will, and you too.”

  By then Fermín José had returned to his chess game and didn’t hear Elena’s response.

  Six days later, fully recovered from her gastrointestinal distress but with her nerves still on edge, Elena boarded the bus that would take her on her first trip to the capital. She took with her a small suitcase that contained, along with a few clothes and toiletries, Arcilla’s book and the print of Las Meninas Eulalia had given her. The only other time she’d been on a bus was at the age of twelve when she and her mother paid a visit to her great-aunt Manuela, one of the mountain people who fled the war and settled in a neighboring village.

  The bus to the capital took the flatland route through towns that were poorer in appearance than Piedra Negra and some that were larger and cleaner, with glass buildings and many parks and boulevards. The bus crossed a river of brown water churning through jagged rocks and another river of green water that moved calmly through glades and forests and another of clear water, where Elena saw men up to their knees holding fishing lines and a group of naked boys jumping from an overhanging tree branch and a farmer bathing a horse that was lost in the convolutions of its equine mind. She went by fallow sugarcane fields and broken-down sugar mills and farmhouses overgrown with weeds. She saw three cemeteries, crossing herself each time, more from habit than religious devotion, and many churches and a railroad crossing, after which the bus stopped to refuel. She bought two dough fritters from a girl who sold them from a stand on the side of the road and had to throw them away because they tasted of spoiled fish. Night fell and she slept and woke in the dark. A man had sat down next to her who smelled of earth and sweat. He wore a white guayabera torn at the shoulder and wheezed softly. He snorted and spoke in his sleep, invoking strange names like Anocleto, Godofredo, and Alevoso, following each name with a click or a grunt. Elena couldn’t figure out what the man was dreaming about and then it came to her: those were names typically given to oxen. The man was a teamster and he must have been dreaming about his animals. She fell asleep listening to the teamster and awoke an hour later to feel his head resting on her shoulder. His fly was open and he had a hand inside his pants. Elena stiffened, too afraid to say anything, until sleep once again took hold of her. By the time the light of dawn hit her face, the seat next to her was vacant, but the man’s strong scent lingered over it.

  The bus was passing through a different sort of landscape now—houses made of brick and mortar instead of wood, a small corral next to a garage where two squalid cows were grazing, and several large Soviet-style buildings, moss-covered and anomalous in the tropics. On one of the balconies stood a large woman wearing hair curlers. She was bare-chested, her breasts hanging like large fruit over the railing, and she waved at the bus as it passed. Elena saw houses falling apart, houses rebuilt with unpainted cinder blocks, houses with overhanging eaves held up by two-by-fours, lots filled with rubble, boarded-up stores and others already open this early in the morning, their bare shelves visible from the street. She saw mounds of refuse, and walls on which graffiti was painted. Some of it was vulgar and she was embarrassed—MÁMAME LA PINGA, TU HERMANA ES PUTA. The neater ones praised the government and the revolution that gave birth to it—SOCIALISMO O MUERTE, VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN—exhortations that in Piedra Negra, so close as it was to the war, had lost their luster. The bus passed industrial installations rusting under the unrelenting tropical sun and a refinery with tall metal chimneys from which emanated a viscous yellow smoke. Crossing an unfinished road that led nowhere, the bus passed by several baseball fields surrounding a sports complex and took a narrow street into an older section of buildings from the time of the republic, with their baroque, irrelevant beauty, which had survived the wrecking ball of the new order. She saw structures that had the appearance of huge mausoleums, many more old houses, thousands of columns and increasing numbers of people on their way to school or work as the bus driver maneuvered with great precision around large potholes that pocked the street.

  Finally, at nine in the morning, three hours behind schedule, the bus entered the parking lot of the central depot. Elena waited until all her fellow passengers had disembarked, then got off and stood at the curb with suitcase in hand, feeling displaced and foreign, like a character in a movie without a script. Even though she’d written ahead to the Writers’ Union to let them know of her arrival, no one was there to greet her. Feeling as if she had left something behind, she became anxious and rummaged through her oversize purse. Everything she’d packed was there—her wallet, the letter from the Writers’ Union, a compact case, a brand-new notebook, and several pens. Then it came to her that it was Soledad she was missing. She calmed herself thinking that she’d be away only a few days, long enough to receive the prize and oversee the book’s publication, after which she would return to Piedra Negra to take care of her daughter. Still, for the first time she recognized a small, vague hole inside herself where her maternal instinct should have been. The thought caused her consternation and she put it out of mind. There were more pressing matters to attend to at that moment.

  She went inside the station to use the bathroom, and when she came out, she bought a lard bun with guava paste and a café con leche from an old man who operated a small stand next to the entrance. He had the broad forehead and large ears of a clown. Even at that hour it was very hot and beads of sweat formed on his temples, which he kept wiping with a yellowed handkerchief. Elena bit into the bun, which was stale, but she was so hungry that she ate it in three bites. With nowhere to go and no one to call she became agitated, pacing back and forth before the old man. She peeked inside the station, which was now empty except for the bored attendant behind the ticket counter, who looked at herself in a compact mirror as she rearranged her bangs from one side of her forehead to the other.

  The old man approached Elena and asked whom she was waiting for. Elena tried explaining about the poets’ visit to Piedra Negra and her own work and the letter announcing the prize and the long bus trip and that someone was supposed to pick her up but no one came, and, finally, she spoke about the daughter she had left behind and how worried she was about her.

  “Listen, my girl,” the man said. “I didn’t ask for your life story. It’s clear no one is coming for you. Come home with me and you can rest there and figure out what to do.”

  She’d heard tales in Piedra Negra about people from the capital, how fresh they were with outsiders and took advantage of them at the first opportunity. She picked up her suitcase and was about to go back inside and buy a return ticket to Piedra Negra when the man insisted in a gentle, paternal voice that he wasn’t out to hurt her.

  “I’m old and happily married. My wife is a schoolteacher. Perhaps she can help you.”

  Elena nodded tentatively, averting her eyes, sensing that she had no choice but to go with the old man.

  He gave his name—Juan Delgado—locked up his small, wooden stand, and made an attempt to pick up her suitcase, which she rebuffed with a wave of her hand.

  “I’ll carry the suitcase,” she said, too sternly perhaps, then attempted to soften her statement by adding that she was from Piedra Negra, as if that explained something unsaid. Juan�
�s wife, Mirta, was used to having her husband bring people to the house, including stragglers from the provinces who’d come to the capital in search of their fortune, retirees in need of a meal, children seeking refuge from neglectful parents, and, once, a five-piece tango ensemble, who didn’t have enough money to make it back to Buenos Aires and stayed with them a week. And so when Juan introduced Elena to her, Mirta offered the young woman a cursory smile and continued hand-feeding her pet parrot, a striking green bird with a pink throat and white face she called Pity. Elena looked closer and saw that Mirta was giving the parrot bits of picadillo. She was surprised and said to Mirta that she’d never seen a parrot eat ground beef. “Cuban parrots do,” Mirta said, “when they can get it.”

  When Juan said that Elena was in the city to accept the National Poetry Prize, Mirta softened her attitude, for she’d heard of the prize and its stature, and volunteered to take Elena to the Writers’ Union the following afternoon. She even offered Elena the couch to sleep on that night.

  While Mirta prepared dinner, Juan led Elena through a set of narrow stairs that opened to the roof, where he had built a pergola with wood he’d picked up from the refuse pile across the street, the result of a building collapse several months before. The pergola was covered by a grapevine and under it was a pigeon coop that ran the length of the mold-stained wall. The cooing was loud and incessant.

  “These pigeons are my poets,” Juan said. “I have one hundred. Last week I lost some to another flock. My males are very dominant, but the best of the bunch is a female.”

  Even under the shade of the pergola it was very hot. Elena said she was thirsty. Juan lifted the ceramic lid off a barrel and ladled some water for her. It tasted sweet and cool.